


A Way Out

by SadMageCentral



Series: Finding You Can Change [1]
Category: Elder Scrolls Online
Genre: Backstory, Dialogue Heavy, Fix-It, Gen, Ghosts, Graphic Description, Self-Sacrifice, Some Plot, Undead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-14
Updated: 2019-03-14
Packaged: 2019-11-17 23:42:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18108905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SadMageCentral/pseuds/SadMageCentral
Summary: Durgakh the Elf-Like, an Orsimer Vestige with a soft heart, finds a way to bring back her new friend Laloriaran Dynar as he is fatally wounded.





	A Way Out

They have done it. They have prevailed. They have turned the tide of battle against the snarling, lashing, poison-spitting, betentacled horde of Molag Bal. The Mages’ and Fighters’ Guilds, supported by the kings and queen of the alliances of men and mer, and led by Vanus Galerion, the Great Mage himself (as he is quite fond of reminding everyone), and Laloriaran Dynar, the last ruler of the lost Ayleid civilization, who, having been imprisoned and tortured by Molag Bal for thousands of years, long outlived the fall of his people, and yet readily took up arms to fight alongside the humans and the beastfolk and those odd-speaking elves of the new age. Until now.

Now, the Ayleid king lays on the floor of the grand temple in the Hollow City - a safe refuge shielded by Meridia’s bright magics, despite being lodged right into the heart of Molag Bal’s Coldharbour, like a diamond-polished thorn in a grunting Daedric beast’s side. The dappled square reflections of the stained glass windows colour his drained face into deceptively warm splashes of red and green, like paint sprinkled over a rough, grey canvas. The crimson swell of blood rushes along the grooves of his ornate golden armour, which once blazed so bright as he led the charge against the monsters, proud to be a champion of Meridia. Except that now he has fulfilled his purpose, and Meridia has  allowed him to slip away, indifferent to what happens to one tiny golden speck amid all those other speck-like mortals, so long as the great evil has been defeated.

‘It’s not fair,’ says the Vestige - one of the many adventurers freed from Coldharbour’s prisons to walk Nirn and gather allies so that they might return in strength on this grand day.

'It’s not fair’.

She kneels by the side of the dying king, with her long, un-Orcishly gangly limbs folded up at awkward angles, and with her snow-white robes smeared with soggy red where she leaned against the stiff, heavy metallic form, magic dancing like gossamer between her shaking green fingers in an attempt to quell the bleeding. Her skin, marked by gnarly scars during the raging blaze that she once set in the streets of Camlorn to ward off the advancing horde of werewolves, has darkened to a deep fir-needle shade with the scalding heat of emotion - barely held back behind her tightly pursed lips, which she has been biting into so hard that her prominent jutting tusks (perhaps the only feature reaffirming that this skinny, narrow-chested maiden with a flower in her thickly braided black hair is, indeed, an Orc) have left two raw gashes across her mouth.

'He never got to leave Coldharbour,’ she persists, in a quieter, shakier voice, while her broad nostrils quiver and her whiteless eyes brim over like molten silver. 'He never got to feel the sun on his skin again, after so many centuries of nothing but cold and dark and those burning magic chains. Never got to see how much the world has changed; how much humans have flourished since he last stood up for them against the… other Ayleids. He never got to… live. To rest’.

'He still can do all of this,’ a voice says over her shoulder, croaky and echoing. Not like any voice that would come from the throat of a mortal. She looks up, expression alight with a tentative hope - and locks her streaming bleary gaze with a pair of eyes that are more like little orbs of intangible, ghostly mage fire, set in the sunken sockets of a see-through skull. Or an approximation of a skull, at any rate, moulded out of bluish, faintly glowing essence, just as the rest of the body it is attached to: long knobbly arms, withered like the dessicated remains of the honoured dead laid to rest under the sands of Alik'r; a jutting ribcage, where each bone is a slightly hazy smear of blue and white; and scarcely any legs to speak of, with the lower contours disappearing into a cloud of coiling vapour.

This is but one of the many friends the Vestige made among the undead - creatures that Meridia, mistress of the infinite energies of life, should not have tolerated in her hallowed pocket realm. But perhaps she turned a blind eye on the Orcish adventurer’s gaggle of tainted tag-alongs because defeating Molag Bal was more important?

Regardless, this particular Vestige, Durgakh, was rightly dubbed Elf-Like, by her eye-rolling kin back at the stronghold - where she, the hearthwife’s daughter, was overshadowed by her half-sisters, the proper, tough and broad Orc women, ready to honour Malacath at the roaring forge and in the bloody daze of battle and under the beast pelts lining a chieftain’s bed - not only for her frail built, product of the harrowing, vicious frosts that raged through the winter of her birth, but also for her disposition, product of all those fancy city-written books that her mother let her read, keeping her under her wing and close to the hearth she minded.

She has always been too soft, too forgiving, too trusting, towards all beings living and unliving.

 There has never been any doubt in her mind that there is a kernel of goodness in everyone, enough to earn them a happy ending; and that the hand of friendship should be extended even to the vilest creatures ever to tread Nirn. From the vampire coven of Rivenspire, whose head she rescued from Molag Bal, heading out to search his prison with as much determination as when she raced to break the bonds of King Dynar; to the repentant necromancer from Glenumbra, whom she solemnly promised that she would free him from the curse that has turned him into a knotted mass of rotting flesh held together by slithering, malicious thorned vines. And to this very ghost - a lost Ayleid, just like Dynar, whom she found trapped in the high-vaulted, mist-filled catacombs under some forlorn ruined tower that had half-sunk into the rippling green foam of tree canopies.

The ghost has followed her on her adventures, eager to explore the world at the height of the Second Era, and never too hesitant to toss aside a wry remark or dozen about 'mortals these days’. But now, it seems, the ghostly Ayleid could not be more serious.

'The life has not yet quite ebbed from him,’ the echoing voice continues, as a mummy-like hand hovers along the sharpened outlines of the fallen king’s upturned, unseeing, senseless face.

'I can sense a small flicker calling to me, in the whispers of our shared blood. If I give up all my Aetherial essence to sustain him, this flicker may grow back into a light’.

'But you… You will be gone,’ Durgakh points out, in the smallest of voices, her bony shoulders suddenly sagging under the weight of all the memories she and the ghost have shared. All the paths they have taken, all the magical fights where they have prevailed - a wide-eyed Orc girl and her half-transparent, wisecracking sidekick, often deliberately exasperated, but always loyal.

'Yes,’ the ghost says simply. 'But the king will return. He was not my king, obviously… He may even have been from a rival city… So I do not serve him… But you said it yourself. He deserves to experience Nirn like I have. And please do not sniffle, will you? I have had a good life. Or unlife, if you will. And your life… the bizarre, misadventure-packed life of a silly little mortal… Has been the best part of it’.


End file.
